Eruditorum Press

The bodies on the gears of the culture industry

Elizabeth Sandifer

About Elizabeth Sandifer

http://www.eruditorumpress.com

Elizabeth Sandifer created Eruditorum Press. She’s not really sure why she did that, and she apologizes for the inconvenience. She currently writes Last War in Albion, a history of the magical war between Alan Moore and Grant Morrison. She used to write TARDIS Eruditorum, a history of Britain told through the lens of a ropey sci-fi series. She also wrote Neoreaction a Basilisk, writes comics these days, and has ADHD so will probably just randomly write some other shit sooner or later. Support Elizabeth on Patreon.

Posts by Elizabeth Sandifer:

The Moment Has Been Prepared For (The Day of the Doctor)

97

Well, at least it’s just the one who committed genocide and not the one in that
awful coat.
Cometh the hour, cometh the man. The hour, in this case, was actually about seventy-five minutes long, commencing at 7:50 PM on November 23rd, 2013. Martin Garrix was at number one with “Animals,” with Lily Allen, Lorde, One Direction, Lady Gaga, and Eminem also charting. In the six months since The Name of the Doctor had aired, Edward Snowden had created a major international stir when he leaked a significant trove of classified information about the extent of surveillance operations being routinely carried out by the US and UK governments, Mohamed Morsi was deposed as President of Egypt in a military coup, and Typhoon Haiyan struck the Philippines and Vietnam, killing more than six thousand people. The man, of course, was Steven Moffat. 
The Day of the Doctor did not quite win universal praise. It just won stellar ratings, an impressive 88% AI rating, the distinction of being only the second episode of Doctor Who ever to hit the number one slot in the weekly ratings, and Doctor Who Magazine’s 50th Anniversary poll for the greatest story of all time. Nothing is all things to everyone, but it is difficult to imagine something coming much closer than The Day of the Doctor did. And yet The Day of the Doctor arrived after an enormously troubled production season, and was hardly an uncomplicated production in its own right, with executive producer Caro Skinner quitting the series a few weeks before shooting began, on top of the entire mess of Eccleston initially expressing interest and subsequently declining to reprise the role. That it avoided being an outright disaster given these circumstances seems a lucky break. That it was an insta-classic seems a small miracle.
At the heart of its success is a script by Moffat that is unapologetically committed to the episode’s grandeur. The episode deploys big set piece after big set piece, rarely waiting long between them. The TARDIS helicopter lift starts at the two minute mark. At seven minutes, we jump into the Time War. Billie Piper shows up six minutes later, David Tennant six minutes after that, at around the twenty minute mark. At twenty-seven minutes, Smith and Tennant share the screen for the first time. The big Zygon awakening/invasion breaks out at thirty-five minutes. Six minutes later is the big “did you ever count the children” three-way confrontation among the Doctors, which, while lacking the immediate grandeur of some of the other instances, is nevertheless a huge moment. The biggest slow period of the episode is the subsequent ten minutes building to the Doctors blasting their way out of Gallifrey Falls No More, bringing us to the fifty-two minute mark. By fifty-eight minutes, all three Doctors are agreeing to commit double genocide. And seven minutes later the thirteen-Doctor montage has kicked off. And six minutes thereafter the Curator shows. 
But for all the accelerated pace involved in jumping from set piece to set piece, what’s also striking is the way in which the individual set pieces are generally given room to breathe.
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Super-Vampires Rule the Night (The Last War in Albion Part 81: Guy Fawkes Day, Bauhaus)

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Comics Reviews will return on February 11th.

This is the ninth of fifteen parts of The Last War in Albion Chapter Nine, focusing on Alan Moore’s work on V for Vendetta for Warrior (in effect, Books One and Two of the DC Comics collection). An omnibus of all fifteen parts can be purchased at Smashwords. If you purchased serialization via the Kickstarter, check your Kickstarter messages for a free download code.

The stories discussed in this chapter are currently available in a collected edition, along with the eventual completion of the story. UK-based readers can buy it here.

Previously in The Last War in Albion: Guy Fawkes tried to blow up the Houses of Parliament.

“Earth 43: A world of darkness and fear where super-vampires rule the night as the BLOOD LEAGUE.” –Grant Morrison, Multiversity Guidebook

Figure 621: William of Orange was crowned William III in the
Glorious Revolution. Here his 1688 arrival is depicted by
James Thornhill (1675-1734).
It is not that this is entirely unsympathetic. Fawkes himself was a Catholic supremacist, but he fit into the same centuries-long tradition of religious dissidence in England that would eventually produce William Blake. And as David Lloyd noted, the basic cheek of trying to blow up Parliament is rather appealing. In the end, though, is not so much the precise ethics of Fawkes the man that are most relevant to the development of V for Vendetta as it is the holiday that sprung up in the wake of the plot. Following its uncovering, the public were allowed to celebrate the plot’s failure by lighting bonfires. The next January, Parliament passed the Observance of 5th November Act, which established a standing holiday commemorating the King’s survival. This holiday persisted, not least because in 1688 William of Orange’s arrival in England to overthrow James II happened to land on November the 5th, the day after his birthday, giving the holiday new resonances. Over time the custom of bonfires came to incorporate first burning the pope in effigy, and then, somewhat more moderately, burning Guy Fawkes in effigy – a tradition that led to the creation of the Guy Fawkes mask, with allowed one to give one’s anti-Catholic effigy a suitably grotesque holiday. 
Figure 622: An 1870s effigy of Guy Fawkes built by a London fruitvendor.
The holiday also, in the 19th century, gradually became a holiday more associated with the working class, a transition that led to a transition away from celebration of victories of the monarchy and towards a more anti-authoritarian approach. Over the course of the century, Fawkes found himself incorporated into popular fiction, starting with William Harrison Ainsworth’s 1841 novel Guy Fawkes, which rehabilitated Fawkes into a more sympathetic character who, by 1905, was appearing as a hero in illustrated books like The Boyhood Days of Guy Fawkes; Or, the Conspirators of Old London. This was very much the spirit in which Moore was introduced to the holiday – he talks of how “when parents explained to their offspring about Guy Fawkes and his attempt to blow up Parliament, there always seemed to be an undertone of admiration in their voices, or at least there did in Northampton.” 
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His Last Vow

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There is, I think, a real case to be made that this is Moffat’s best-ever script, although to be fair there are ways in which it’s difficult to tell. Certainly this is elevated tremendously by the work of everyone else involved. It is ridiculous to pretend that this episode can be praised without acknowledging the toweringly good work turned in by Nick Hurran, Benedict Cumberbatch, Martin Freeman, and Amanda Abbington, and really, stopping there does plenty of people discredit. All the same, the script is a work of stunning genius.

It seems impossible to begin anywhere other than the ending. As I have noted before, this is a script that blatantly advocates for the extra-judicial murder of Rupert Murdoch. Sure, yes, Magnussen is only a transparent metaphor for Murdoch and not Murdoch himself, but all the same, and especially given how willing Moffat has been in interviews to double down and say that he thinks killing Magnusson was the right thing to do, it’s hard to overemphasize the moment, especially given the glorious bluntness with which Mary puts it: “People like Magnussen should be killed. That’s why there are people like me.”

And indeed, this quote gets at one of the central questions of His Last Vow, namely “what exactly sort of person is Mary Watson?” Actually, this is in some ways the only central question of His Last Vow. Certainly a central question is not the superficial issue of “how far ahead of the game is Sherlock,” although this is possibly worth unpacking. We have, by this point, been trained by two consecutive episodes to realize that this is not actually a question upon which Sherlock is inclined to put much weight. The nature of the game is deliberately constructed to twist and wriggle around. Much of the episode is structured around a pair of contrived editing tricks, and while there are occasional clues (“I have an excellent memory’) and the episode does technically play fair, it’s still blatantly changing the rules of the episode in arbitrary and essentially unguessable ways.

Whether you think this is clever or not is largely a personal decision. But in what we might call the normal order f things, the point of these fair but unguessable twists would be to find ways of putting the hero in considerable danger. And yet in His Last Vow, the two times in which Sherlock is disastrously wrong (as opposed to when he’s just blindsided by Mary) are not actually particular problems for him. When he’s wrong about the glasses in the restaurant it’s essentially irrelevant – he moves calmly on to his Christmas plan barely skipping a beat. Being wrong about Appledore’s physical existence is at least more of a problem, but it’s clear he always had “shoot the fucker in the head” as a fallback plan, what with telling John to bring his gun.

Which makes sense. Sherlock, after all, is an ontological character, defined as the one who is always ahead of everybody else in the game.…

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Dear Santa: The Doctors Revisited (Matt Smith)

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You can tell that we’ve reached the present day quite early on, not least because Matt Smith suddenly shows up to have opinions on the show, having not been interviewed about any of his predecessors. But the real giveaway is the choices of episodes in the first segment, when introducing the character of the Eleventh Doctor. Every previous episode displayed a strong bias towards the earliest episodes for a Doctor. Whereas this pulls almost entirely from Season 7B, unabashedly positioning this as the present day of Doctor Who.

Yes, we eventually look back a few years and do the Ponds, which is somewhat historicized, but there’s no added insight to be had. These are the same talking points from Doctor Who Confidential and endless publicity interviews, dutifully trotted out again. Their context is only altered by the preceding ten episodes of this, which serve to make all of this look like the telos of Doctor Who itself.

With the historical perspective that a year allows us, this is not quite true. The focus on how Matt Smith, while the youngest actor ever to play the part, makes the Doctor seem old is a common talking point, and indeed was brought up in relation to the Capaldi casting, by this time long since announced. More interesting is the segment on Clara, which came at a point where she was widely viewed as a frightfully generic companion. There’s not a lot, but it’s acutely clear that Coleman in particular sees more depth in the character, and has ideas for what to do with her. The argument that Deep Breath doesn’t constitute a soft reboot of Clara but rather the moment when everybody started seeing what was always there has some solid support here.

Elsewhere, we can also see how this is quietly setting up the immediate future. There’s not much that directly tees up The Day of the Doctor, but the features on Madame Kovarian, the Silence, and the Weeping Angels quietly serve as a primer for Time of the Doctor. And, of course, there’s the fact that when this aired, Smith was a lame duck Doctor. His successor had been announced, and indeed, was either a week off from his debut or had debuted yesterday (depending on whether you watched this in the US or the UK – this was the only one to debut first in the UK).

And so there’s an odd dualism here. On the one hand, this does what one always suspected it would: presents the Moffat era as the ultimate in Doctor Who. Of course it does. The point of all of these sorts of specials is promotion of the show, and has been since Confidential. But on the other, it leads the show right up to the brink of a known transition. There’s a triumph as we reach the present, but also, and in some ways more importantly, a sort of “right, on to the next half-century” attitude. Which is a good place to be after fifty years.…

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Hey, Turn That Down: The Doctors Revisited (David Tennant)

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At last, we reach the end of history, with an episode that is set up to, basically, repeat the same talking points about the Tenth Doctor that were being used when he was still on screen. This is as straightforward as it is possible to be – an unabashed display case for an era of Doctor Who that everybody knows is a classic.

Which, fair enough. There’s really no getting around the fact that the Tennant era was wildly popular, and that Tennant is always going to be one of the iconic portrayals of the Doctor. There are no apologias to make, and as of 2013, at least, the Tennant era hadn’t slipped into history, not least because Tennant was going to be making a return in less than a month anyway, with no explanation of why he looked older or anything like that necessary. There was, really, no other way to do this.

That said, the selection of what to focus on is interesting. Noticeably absent is any standing in the rain. There’s a little bit of the Bad Wolf Bay scene from Doomsday, but for the most part the two iconic emotional scenes from Tennant’s era, the departures of Rose and Donna, are entirely skipped over. This is even more striking given that Martha’s departure is featured in detail. There’s no mention of Human Nature/Family of Blood either. In other words, all the moments of Tennant’s Doctor being pushed to extremes are skipped.

Instead we get a focus on Tennant in default mode. There are sizeable clips from The Sontaran Stratagem and The Idiot’s Lantern, both of which are fine scenes, but which would appear on almost nobody’s instinctive list of major David Tennant scenes. To some extent, this demonstrates the level of confidence that they clearly have in the material: nobody is trying to sell David Tennant. Indeed, it’s somewhat refreshing to look at him in these scenes. Tennant’s best scenes are indeed extraordinary, but it’s easy to forget that he was also extraordinarily good at just being a foundation for the show to build on.

This also gets at the closest thing to a problem with this episode, however. For all its confidence, it shares the Peter Davison episode’s strange failure to actually ever describe what this iteration of the Doctor is actually like. Loads of talking heads are ready to line up and, quite rightly, say how wonderful David Tennant is, but nobody can actually nail down what his Doctor was like and why he was so iconic. Perhaps it’s simply too soon, but either way, it’s a glaring omission.

The other strange thing is the story chosen. It’s not that it’s a poor choice – indeed, there may be no story quite so Tennanty as The Stolen Earth/Journey’s End. But the story notably, gets no coverage in the episode itself, unlike the previous few, which took pains to get the viewer up to speed on what they were going to watch. This works fine – really, who needs a substantial introduction to the most popular Doctor Who story ever?…

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A Wishful Past, All Jungled Over (The Last War in Albion Part 80: Anarchism, Inspiration, Guy Fawkes)

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This is the eighth of fifteen parts of The Last War in Albion Chapter Nine, focusing on Alan Moore’s work on V for Vendetta for Warrior (in effect, Books One and Two of the DC Comics collection). An omnibus of all fifteen parts can be purchased at Smashwords. If you purchased serialization via the Kickstarter, check your Kickstarter messages for a free download code.

The stories discussed in this chapter are currently available in a collected edition, along with the eventual completion of the story. UK-based readers can buy it here.

Previously in The Last War in Albion: One of the major themes of V for Vendetta is the idea of anarchism, a philosophical movement Moore eventually described in some detail in an essay for Dodgem Logic, in which he listed various historical forms of the concept.

“Sounds like a wishful past, all jungled over, a heroic run and the what-for of everything fuck simple.” -Alan Moore, Crossed +100

Figure 613: William Godwin
He turns also to Mikhail Bakunin’s Collectivist Anarchism, with was an important predecessor to Marxism, along with Peter Kropotkin’s rejection of private property, and, more contemporarily, Hakim Bey (who in addition to being an anarchist and pedophilia advocate was an open sorcerer, defining the concept as “the systematic cultivation of enhanced consciousness or non-ordinary awareness and its deployment in the world of deeds and objects to bring about desired results”). But for the purposes of understanding Blake, perhaps the most important thinker Moore touches upon is William Godwin, whose Political Justice, in Moore’s account, advocated “that the individual act according to his or her individual judgement while allowing every single other individual the same liberty.”
Figure 614: One of Blake’s illustrations
for Mary Wollstonecraft’s Original Stories
from Real Life. (1791)
Political Justice, more properly titled Enquiry Concerning Political Justice and its Influence on Morals and Happiness, was published in 1793, the same year as America a Prophecy, and Godwin and Blake traveled in similar circles – Blake did a series of illustrations for Godwin’s future wife Mary Wollstonecraft’s Original Stories from Real Life in 1791, for instance. (Godwin and Wollstonecraft’s daughter, also named Mary, would go on to have a significant career of her own, largely under her married name, acquired from “Ozymandias” poet Percy Bysshe Shelley.) Blake followed Godwin no more than he did any other man, but the intellectual similarities are clear enough.
Figure 615: The cover for the third issue
of The Northampton Arts Group Magazine,
featuring an iteration of Alan Moore’s concept
for “the Doll.” (c. 1973)
For Moore’s part, at least in terms of V for Vendetta, the most obvious anarchist to mention is Colin Ward, whose Anarchy in Action was first published in 1973, when Moore was working with the Northampton Arts Group, putting out zines while writing spoken word pieces like “Old Gangsters Never Die,” submitting a doomed proposal for “a freakish terrorist in white-face make-up who traded under the name of the Doll and waged war upon a totalitarian state sometime in the late 1980s” to future Starblazer publisher DC Thomson, dreaming up his sci-fi epic Sun Dodgers and the character of Five, “a mental patient of undefined but unusual abilities who had been kept in a particular room, room five,” and meeting Phyllis Dixon, who he quickly married the next year.
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Comics Reviews (January 21st, 2015)

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Worst to best.

Moon Knight #11

One of the most pointlessly decompressed comics I think I have ever read. All the optimism I had when the very cool twist of someone stealing Khonshu from Marc Spector has thoroughly evaporated in the face of this.

All-New X-Men #35

So, next month issue #38 of this ties in with the not-very-interesting sounding Black Vortex, which does rather make one wonder what the release schedule of this is meant to look like. I can only assume that this Ultimate Universe crossover arc was not, in fact, intended to stretch out past the announcement of how Secret Wars would be working such that it was drained of all its excitement, and that this was not meant to become the exercise in “dear god is this arc still going on” that it’s become. Oh well.

Fables #148

It says very little good about this exercise in “oh god why have I bought over 150 comics called Fables in my lifetime” that the story of Lauda, which has very little to do with anything else in the plot, is by miles the best thing going on in the issue.

Amazing Spider-Man #13

This has lost some momentum from an exciting start, but has at least gained some of it back for the finish. I have to say, though, the Uncle Ben stuff feels like it was introduced far too late in the game to have the impact that the story seems to want from it. I just can’t bring myself to get that invested in the personal struggles of an alternate universe Uncle Ben, and the conceit of “he blames his own honorable nature for everything going wrong” is, while clever, just not doing it for me. I absolutely do not look forward to his inevitable heroic sacrifice next issue.

Captain American and the Mighty Avengers #4

This finally settles into being the book it wants to be, with Ewing getting to do his take on Sam Wilson as Captain America, as opposed to Sam Wilson as evil. It’s a promising book. I wish this had gotten to be the first issue. Still, four months to enjoy this before Secret Wars comes and fucks everything up again, I guess?

Guardians of the Galaxy #23

A few pages into its last issue, Planet of the Symbiotes reaches the planet of the symbiotes. I am to some extent reviewing past issues here, but I’m at a genuine loss for why we spent two near-identical issues fighting in space instead of just letting this be a two issue arc like it really wanted to be. Still, love the final page cliffhanger.

Doctor Who: The Eleventh Doctor #7

An extremely compelling first half of a two-part story, with some excellent plot twists for Alice and some compelling mysteries for the other characters. I love the Eternal Dogfight, and there’s some excellent Eleven-specific beats in this. Continues to be the best Doctor Who comic ever.

Loki: Agent of Asgard #10

This promised to finally pay off the long-simmering consequences of Kieron Gillen’s landmark Journey into Mystery run, and it does so in spades, carefully and meticulously dooming Loki in a fascinating way.…

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The Sign of Three

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This post is one of those supported by my backers on Patreon. If you can spare a dollar a week to help keep this blog running past the end of TARDIS Eruditorum, it would be greatly appreciated. 

“These tales of ratiocination owe most of their popularity to being something in a new key. I do not mean to say that they are not ingenious — but people think them more ingenious than they are — on account of their method and air of method. In the “Murders in the Rue Morgue”, for instance, where is the ingenuity of unravelling a web which you yourself (the author) have woven for the express purpose of unravelling? The reader is made to confound the ingenuity of the supposititious Dupin with that of the writer of the story.” – Edgar Allen Poe

The basic dramatic engine of Sherlock, by this point, has become the cathartic click as the puzzle box’s mechanisms slide into place in a moment of triumphant Aristoteleanism. Over ninety minutes, this produces an interesting effect. Because ninety minutes is also more or less your basic length for a film, there is a tendency to describe Sherlock in those terms – as periodic triptychs of Sherlock Holmes films. With two thirds of the episodes set as event episodes (that is, premieres or finales), it’s easy to get swept up in this.

Nevertheless, Sherlock is unmistakably television. The Sign of Three is a prime example – it is well aware that it has no obligation to make a stirring case for its scale and scope. Its end is a self-consciously subdued homage to The Green Death, it contains not a single overt tease of Magnusson. It is confident that people who are watching it will probably do so again in a week, and so does not engage in the sort of sprawling, ambitious cliffhanger that films (and, to be fair, series finales) do to hold interest over the course of months and years.

Perhaps more importantly, it shares Doctor Who‘s willingness to push against traditional dramatic structures. If one pauses Sherlock to ask “how much time is left,”one is almost always slightly surprised – the big plot beats never happen at quite the moment they’re scheduled. The dramatic climax of The Sign of Three comes a full ten minutes from the end, which isn’t unheard of, except that the last ten minutes are all quite subdued and tension free, as opposed to an exploration of the consequences of the climax or setup for something else. The plot is based around a pair of extended flashbacks that don’t seem connected to each other or the larger episode until the end. Instead there’s the continual anticipation of resolution – of the moment where things slot into place and the seemingly disjointed plotting is suddenly revealed as the precise clockwork of dramatic unity.

The Sign of Three, in other words, shows Sherlock as a well-oiled machine. Sherlock’s best man speech – contributed largely (and obviously) by Moffat – is a marvel.…

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Regeneration: A Personal History of Doctor Who

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A planned guest post for today fell through at the last minute, and Anna Wiggins graciously stepped in to deliver her thoughts on Missy and trans issues, which is not really in chronological sequence, but again, the planned post fell through. And more to the point, it’s brilliant, so really, who cares about chronology. This is a blog about time travel, dammit. 

Also! The fantastic folks at the Pex Lives podcast invited me on this month to talk about The Ribos Operation and Last Christmas. It was a hoot to record. I’m mostly just ranting and pontificating, but if you enjoy me spontaneously staking out excessively bold critical positions, you’ll love this.

It is the summer of 1993. I am watching PBS, which is showing a weird old British sci-fi show that I enjoy watching whenever I catch it on. On screen, Romana (a character I like a lot) is trying on different bodies. It’s silly, and the Doctor is being kind of mean to her, (I don’t know to use the word sexist yet) but the idea of trying on a new body is amazing. In the most secret part of myself, I wish I could do that. I wish I could look like princess Astra.

It is the end of summer, 1998. I don’t want to be alive any more. In a couple of weeks, I will try to kill myself. I will slip outside in the middle of the night, walk several miles into the woods down trails only I know about, to a clearing I spend a lot of time hiding in. I will take the razor blade on my swiss army knife and try to cut my wrist open. But the blade won’t be sharp enough, and the pain and shock of seeing my own blood will stop me before I go too far.

I will spend the next ten years feeling like a coward. I will regret failing. I will think often about trying again.

It is April of 2010. A new friend of mine is in town, and is talking about how great the new Doctor Who is. He suggests I watch it some time. My hazy, pleasant memories of Mary Tamm and Lalla Ward help make his case, and a few weeks later I marathon series 1 with my husband. I am hooked, and catch up just after series 5 ends.

It is May 14th, 2011. The Doctor’s Wife is on TV. Neil Gaiman just used some throwaway dialogue to casually write in the possibility of time lords changing gender when they regenerate. The exact dialogue is a bit irksome, but I don’t care; this is huge and affirming and very clearly a challenge for the showrunners to live up to. I’m thrilled about this. Exactly one month ago, I legally changed my name to Anna Rose Wiggins.

It is August 4th, 2013. I am watching a live stream of the Peter Capaldi announcement. The last few weeks have been interesting for me, because this is the first regeneration I’ve been an active fan for.…

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